Quotes by H. L. Mencken
The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (Varieties of Envy).
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.